Boosting Conversions with Cialdini’s 6 Persuasion Principles, Part 3

As you have seen in part 1 and part 2, Dr. Robert Cialdini’s persuasion principles have been used by marketing professionals for years to enhance sales in traditional contexts, and as we’ve seen in Big Red SEO’s previous installments on this topic, they also translate very well to the realm of internet marketing. Today our team of SEO specialists will go through the last of Cialdini’s principles of persuasion and divulge some secrets in putting them to use to drive your conversions!

What does it mean to like someone? This may seem like an easy question, but chances are you’ll find it hard to put your answer into words. Usually it presents as a simple gut feeling—you like someone because you like them—but as it turns out, likeability is determined by a series of complex and often unconscious judgments. As a business you obviously want to be liked, but how do you go about sowing the seeds of likeability? By understanding the steps people go through in making these judgments.

First thing’s first…you can’t like someone you don’t know. As a business owner, you need to communicate who you are, both as a person and as a company, in order for your customers to get a sense of who they’re going to be buying from. The most direct means of letting your customers in on who you are is through your company’s “About Us” page. It’s amazing how many companies treat this page as an afterthought, not as the vital tool it is for establishing a relationship between you and the customer. Use this space to humanize yourself and your staff, and connect your good qualities to what you’ll be able to do for the customer.

Note: People tend to like those they have things in common with. Your company’s “About Us” page should focus on pointing out those similarities between you, your employees, your company philosophy, and your customer!

Principle #6 – Scarcity…Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

This principle boils down to the fact that it’s easiest to persuade someone to buy something if they perceive that it has limited availability. It’s human nature to not want to miss out, so taking advantage of scarcity properly can do a lot to help ramp up conversions. For example, we’re much more likely to purchase a product if we’re told that it’s the last one or if a special price will expire soon. This kind of language lights a fire under us, so to speak, and is often the final persuasion we need to make a purchase.

The concept of scarcity is used all the time to great effect by various businesses. For instance, a travel site like Expedia.com will advertise “1 seat left at this price,” with the implicit suggestion that prices will go up if the customer doesn’t make their purchase now. This can be a great motivator, especially for those travelers who tend to procrastinate or time the market.

While pointing out a product’s limited quantity is a great method of utilizing scarcity, our team of content development specialists suggests that you should also take advantage of time-limited scarcity. Using a tool like a countdown timer to display when a particular deal will end helps to spur customers into action at the crucial moment of conversion.

Contact Big Red SEO Today at (402) 522-6468!

We at Big Red SEO hope that this blog series has shown you the benefits of keeping Cialdini’s principles of persuasion in mind when crafting the language of your customer interactions. These principles have been used for years in traditional marketing, and as ecommerce becomes increasingly important to almost all business models, they can be adapted easily to the changing environment of modern marketing as well.

Big Red SEO is a full-service web design and SEO company in Omaha, Nebraska, specializing in creating strategies that help our clients enhance their visibility on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Our team understands how web design and content development can come together to raise your business to the top of search engine rankings, Fill out out contact form or give us a call today at (402) 522-6468 to get started!

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Kimberly Treacy (Talbot) is an SEO Guru with a ‘no bullshit’ attitude. As the owner of Big Red SEO, she provides companies of all sizes what they need to know to get their business in front of those looking for their services and products. Big Red SEO is one of the few search engine optimization companies that offers ‘industry exclusivity’ meaning we only work with one company within an industry and their market at a time.